


Moonrise

by Schistosity



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Blood, Gen, Harm to Children, Hurt/Comfort, It's MY fic I get to decide how nice Claude's parents are, Rated For Violence, The "The Crest of Riegan Is Super Fucked Up Actually" Manifesto, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:47:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27016765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schistosity/pseuds/Schistosity
Summary: The first time Khalid kills someone he is ten-and-a-quarter and it is not his fault.Rather, it is his fault, but he hadn’t really meant to do it.~Whumptober 2020 - Day 15: Into the Unknown, Magical Healing
Comments: 20
Kudos: 151
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Moonrise

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on an event alluded to in my fic [my fellow passerine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24625273/chapters/59492041), which EAGLE EYED VIEWERS might recognise, but I couldn’t find a place for it in there (plus it didn’t really fit the tone). So here it is on its own, because it’s Whumptober and my forte is hurting people 😈
> 
> This features graphic violence specifically towards a child, so please be mindful if that’s going to be something potentially upsetting!
> 
> [vibe check: give it up for day 15!](https://open.spotify.com/track/6Hb9QNk6wr437EznslUC9a?si=pOPtpDsISbGXBKeMacuhfw)

The first time Khalid kills someone he is ten-and-a-quarter and it is not his fault. 

Rather, it  _ is _ his fault, but he hadn’t really meant to do it.

He is usually a light sleeper, but the warm night has lulled him into a more secure doze than usual. After tonight, he will not allow himself to be so relaxed again.

Despite his carelessness, he manages to awaken right before the assassin brings his knife down. 

For one startling moment of clarity, Khalid looks into the eyes of a stranger, whose face is cast in sharp angles by moonlight spilling through an open window, blade flashing overhead like captured starlight. But the moment is just that—a moment—and before he can think about doing anything there is a hand clamped over his mouth and a knife flying towards him.

_ When this story is later told to crowds of gossipmongers in packed taverns and around campfires to scared children, some will say the knife bounced right back—as useless as if it had struck polished marble. _

This is not yet a story. The knife comes down at blinding speed and is buried to the hilt in Khalid’s chest. 

The assassin is strong and the prince is so very small. It doesn’t take much doing to skewer him like a pinned prey-animal. Ribs crunch and crack, skin tears, and Khalid’s chest heaves as it begins to fill with blood in place of air. 

He claws uselessly at the assassin’s hands, but there is no strength in his limbs. They are cold, numb,  _ shocked _ in an instant. The blade twists deeper. Pulls. Tears.

Khalid cannot scream around the hand over his mouth, nor the blood swiftly filling it, spilling out over the creased corners of his lips and the gaps in the assassin’s fingers like sloshing wine from a goblet, staining the linen sheets beneath him in much the same fashion. 

He cannot scream so he cries. Tears stream down his face in the silence, filled only by his tiny, struggling gasps and chokes and the laboured breathing of the assassin above him. 

His limbs feel heavy, and his hands slow. His eyes don’t seem to want to stay open, and through a veil of creeping cold and sluggish thoughts, Khalid knows only one thing for certain: he doesn’t want to die.

_ Then I will not,  _ something deep inside him decides. 

And he thinks he really must be dead then, because he swears to every god old and new that his blood is  _ singing _ to him.

_ It will take well over a decade for this story to cross the mountains, but when it is finally told there the Fódlani will simply nod at this detail. They will understand what it means—understand exactly what kind of legacy this boy carries in his veins. _

Khalid has never favoured the fight part of fight or flight. He’s not particularly strong or daring—not yet, at least, not here, aged ten-and-a-quarter—but he’s good at talking and running and hiding.

He can’t talk or run or hide here. So instead, something inside him snaps. 

There is a crescendo in his veins, a grand chorus raging in his arteries. He can feel every stuttering beat of his faltering, dying heart—feels it in his eyes and his mouth and his hands and his gut. 

He grips the hilt in one hand and tears the knife out of both his chest and the man’s startled grasp in one swift motion. Blood sprays in a wide arc from the wound, splattering against the ceiling, and Khalid surges upwards on energy he doesn’t have. 

What’s next is instinct, like breathing and blinking; He swings his arm up with all the force he can muster, and the knife slashes a deep line across the assassin’s neck.

Blood cascades from the wound like flowing water, and Khalid sees the reflection of the moon in the assassin’s eyes, blazing like a beacon. He doesn’t stop to wonder why the moon he sees is a crescent when the moon outside his window is full. 

_ They call him ‘The Undying’ because, up until this point, he has been lucky—saved by expired poisons and poorly aimed shots and a quick thinking mother. After tonight they will call him ‘The Undying’ because he deserves it.  _

A dam breaks.

The assassin—now just a plain, dying man with fear-stricken eyes—exhales his last gurgling breath as Khalid breathes in what feels like his first.

A warmth unlike anything he has ever experienced blooms in his chest, beneath his ribs and in his stomach. For a split second he feels every cell in his body buzzing with power. He feels his innards jerk and shift with clarity; bones crack back into place while torn flesh knits itself back together. His lungs fill with air and the blood in his mouth flows out and doesn’t return. Reprieve. It feels  _ good _ . He feels  _ alive _ . 

At the same time, in the sharp light streaming through the windows, Khalid watches the life utterly leave the man’s body. His skin pales, lips turn blue and dead, and his eyes bulge. The man falls forward onto the bed and Khalid scrambles back as far as he can. The man’s glassy eyes stare blankly ahead. He looks like every drop of warmth has fled him. 

It is here that Khalid finally starts screaming. 

The door flies open at the noise. 

“Your Highness!?”

Cursing. Shouting. Khalid doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look. He just stares at glassy eyes—at a man  _ he _ killed—and feels his body thrum with an energy too comfortable for his liking. He feels an overwhelming feeling that this is good and  _ right _ . 

And he knows something is terribly,  _ terribly _ wrong.

“—the fuck happened?”

“—attacked—”

“—how they got in—”

“—the window—”

There are more people in the room now. Guards, yes, but someone else too. Their words muddle under the deafening beat of Khalid’s pulse in his ears. They haven’t touched Khalid and the wild part of his brain hopes they don’t try. He hopes no one tries. He clutches the knife closer—his knife now. He doesn’t want these strangers near him. He wants them out, he wants—

“Has someone gone to alert the king?”

“N-no, Your Highness.”

“Well then what are you waiting for!? Fucking  _ go! Now! _ ” 

“Yes, Your Highness!” 

_ Oh.  _

Khalid’s brother Ishaq is seventeen and strong in ways his little brothers may never be. He is tall and keen-eyed and handsome. He is well-liked and skilled. Everyone says he will be king, most likely, and the petty fights of his brothers tend to fall somewhere below his attention because of it. So though he is not a  _ safe harbour _ by any stretch of the imagination, he is not a  _ danger _ . 

Khalid wrenches his eyes open as his eldest brother, with a sword on his hip, strides forward into the room. His eyes are dark and piercing behind sleep-mussed hair, and Khalid stiffens under the scrutiny.

Ishaq doesn’t hesitate to pull the body off the bed and let it fall onto the floor, casting a quick glance at the corpse before climbing up onto the mattress in its place. 

“Look at me.”

Khalid leans away instinctively.

“Stop it. Let me see,” Ishaq demands, and though his voice would never be mistaken for soft, it is steady.

Still, Khalid shakes his head.

Ishaq sighs. “Khalid,  _ stop _ . Where are you hurt?” 

Khalid grips the knife tighter. He’s not sure why. The danger is passed. 

Ishaq ignores him and swats his hands down so he can inspect closer. He tilts his head side to side—not gently, but not with malice, either—and bites his lip as he surveys his face and neck for damage. Seeing none, he sits back on his heels and pulls back the ripped folds of Khalid’s shirt. Blood smears across his hands and Khalid doesn’t know who it belongs to.

Confusion dances across Ishaq’s expression. Khalid tries not to flinch under his brother’s cold, probing fingers. 

“What happened to the wound?” He asks.

Khalid looks down at his chest, unblemished save for a ropy, scabbed-over scar where the knife had been. On some instinctive level, he understands that it’s been healed—in the same way a salmon knows where to swim and a bird knows where to fly, he knows—but he doesn’t know  _ how _ . 

“I… I don’t know… I think it healed…” he stammers. His mind whirls. 

Ishaq’s keen eyes shoot from the body on the floor to the flood of blood staining the sheets, to Khalid’s face. He lingers for a long time, and Khalid starts to feel nervous. 

_ “Tch.” _ Ishaq’s face loses any semblance of possible investment, apparently deciding this isn’t worth his time, and he crawls off the bed to examine the body without another word. “Leave it to you to get even  _ weirder _ ...”

He crouches down and begins to rifle through the assassin’s coat pockets. The sound of distant commotion floats in from the hall outside, and Khalid knows it’s only a matter of time before even more people arrive. His other brothers will eventually show up, and he’s uneasy enough with Ishaq, who tends to ignore him on principle, he’s not sure how he’d fare being here with people who hate him like it’s a hobby. 

What he really wants is his mother. So, while Ishaq’s back is turned, he slips out of bed. 

He catches sight of himself in the pooling blood on the floor—he is soaked in the stuff, crimson smeared on his chest and hands, smeared across his lips like an animal. His eyes are wild and shadowed. He looks like a monster—like a ghoul crawled in from a graveyard with a belly full of human flesh.

_ When this story is told later, some will wonder the same thing. The stories of The Undying will be told at the same campfires as tales of flesh-eating night beasts. The stolen knife, in time, will be replaced with claws and fangs, a young boy replaced with an invulnerable monster.  _

Khalid tears his eyes from the red sea on his floor and stumbles out of the room. He almost trips over the threshold of his door into the darkened hallway, and his blood-slicked feet make wet sounds on the cold tile outside. 

The hall seems impossibly wide—the air impossibly chilled, despite the warm night. He’s shaking. How long has he been shaking? 

Two figures, dressed in sleep robes and flanked by armed guards, appear around the far corner. They break into a run as soon as they see him.

“Mom—”

His whimpering cry is cut off as his mother sweeps him into her arms, crushing him against her chest and gripping him tight with trembling hands. She presses her face to the crown of his head, whispering unintelligible nothings into his curls. He doesn’t need to know the words though, he just needs to  _ feel _ them.

Khalid is aware of a quick brush of a hand through his hair as his father runs past him, shouting orders to the guards they’ve brought with them, but he soon loses focus; right now, his senses are only for his mother. 

She pulls back, only barely, just enough to get a look at him. She places her hands on his cheeks, eyes darting around his face to spot any injuries. 

Her nimble hands come down to his shirt, still soaked in blood not entirely his own, and she pulls back the ripped pieces like Ishaq had, but with a more gentle touch. She sees the wound—or lack of one—and he knows she sees it because her concern flickers to confusion for a half-second. When her eyes meet his, they are more searching than fearful. 

“I... killed him,” he says. The words are thick in his mouth but he hopes they’re enough. Through his daze he hopes it’s obvious he fought back. That’s what he’s expected to do. 

“You… you killed him?” She repeats. Her lips purse, and her narrowed eyes jump back to the new scar. That’s not the reaction he’d expected. 

He wonders if he’s in trouble. Probably. He doesn’t want to be.

“My love,” she says softly. “Can you let go for me?”

Khalid realises he’s still holding the knife. 

He drops it without thinking. His mother catches it before it hits the ground. She slips it into the sash at her waist and then reaches up, smoothing back his hair to press a long kiss to his forehead. 

“Am I… in trouble?” he chokes out. 

“Never,” she says, shaking her head. “You are not in trouble. Never for this.” 

_ When this story is told later, they will say the prince walked away from the encounter with his head high. They will not say that his mother carried him away, his legs too weak to walk on his own. They will not say that she cradled him as he cried himself dry, washed him of blood and changed his clothes, and lay him in her own bed. To say those things would mean admitting the subject of the story is a child and not a creature. _

Khalid lies among his mother’s sheets, curled up in them like a cocoon, like the barrier of warm, soft silks is enough to keep him safe. His body shakes with residual ache and that foreign, burning energy in equal measure.

His mother sits down next to him, using a damp cloth to wipe the last of the dried blood from his face. They don’t speak for a very long time—not until well after the commotion outside has died down—but that’s okay. He’s content to just sit with her and let her presence unwind the coils of tension wrapped with suffocating force around his insides. 

“Look at me, Khalid,” his mother says finally, switching to Fódlani. “I need you to tell me exactly what you did.” 

His mother only speaks to him in Fódlani for one of two reasons—either to share a joke just for them, or to keep what they’re saying a secret. He knows right now it’s the second one. 

“He stabbed me. I pulled it out, the… the—” he loses the word, and touches the new scar on his chest to illustrate what he means. 

“The knife?” his mother offers. 

“—the knife. I pulled it out and I hit him with it. I just… I just meant to get him away. I promise—” he feels his heart hammering again, his throat tightening in fear. He switches back to Almyran as panic sets in. “I promise I didn’t mean to kill him. It just happened and I don’t know why. I didn’t even think I just did it and I didn’t mean for it to hurt him that bad bu—but he—he died anyway an—and I—”

He heaves a loud, stuttering sob, burying his face in his mother’s robes. After a moment she lies down and pulls him closer. 

He bites out dry sobs for a long time—he’s not sure how long—and by the time he feels a second weight sit down on the bed he feels empty. 

“Khalid,” his father says. 

“Baba,” he murmurs. “Do you want me to leave?”

He is ten-and-a-quarter, after all; that’s far too old to be sleeping in his parents’ bed. He’s not supposed to cry like this, he’s supposed to fight back. He doesn’t want them to be disappointed, but he just can’t seem to make himself  _ stop _ .

“Not after a night like tonight, little one. You shouldn’t be alone.” 

Khalid’s father hasn’t called him ‘little one’ for years, and though perhaps he should be offended or belittled, that small admission has made him feel safer than he could have possibly imagined. 

He reaches out for his father and waits until he has a solid grasp on him before he lets go of his mother—never entirely unrooted. He feels like he’s learning to swim, drifting from one rock to another in a stormy sea for safety.

His father bundles him in his arms, pressing him close, and Khalid listens to the steady thumping of his heart. 

“There’s so much blood in there, Tia,” his father says to his mother, his voice a deep rumble in his chest. “Too much, for how little he’s injured—” he brings a hand up to smooth down his son’s hair “—Ishaq told me he was stabbed, but that can’t be possible...”

There is silence from his mother, but she must do something because his father speaks again.

“You know what this is?”

“I do.”

“There are rumours about blood magic… the Gonerils—”

“I wouldn’t call it _blood_ _magic_. Crests are… hereditary… something passed down noble lines. Rarer and rarer these days; My brother has one, but I don’t—” his mother stops, and Khalid feels her run a hand down his arm before she continues in a lowered voice, “—we can discuss the specifics later, but… they’re not pretty, in any case.”

His father huffs. “When is your family ever pretty?”

“Oh hush.” 

Khalid is not stupid. He’s observant and intelligent and tactical. He drifts in his father’s embrace, but he doesn’t stop listening—not for a second. 

Crests? His mother says it in Fódlani so it must be something specific, but he doesn’t know the word. Regardless, blood magic or no… what had happened to him was not natural. 

_ He’s _ not natural, and that thought terrifies him. 

The sensation has faded but he won’t forget it. Not ever. The instinct to attack. The pull of his blood towards the violence. The resistance of skin against a stolen blade, crumbling under an alien strength Khalid had pulled from somewhere deep, dark and  _ inside _ .

The  _ exhilaration _ . 

The way his blood had sung to him in a voice so much like his own, yet ancient and powerful—too big for his body, too vast for a human to have any right to hold. The way his dying body had heaved itself back together after breaking that of the assassin. Stolen life. Stolen breath. Dead eyes. A  _ trade _ . 

The  _ hunger _ .

“It felt good,” he mumbles into his father’s chest, so quietly he wonders if he’ll even be heard. The stilling of his father’s breath lets him know he was. He doesn’t look up. 

“What was that, Khalid?”

Khalid grips his father’s tear-stained robes tighter. 

“It felt good,” he says again, the truth falling from his lips like a confession. “When he died, I got better.” 

He knows this is true. He knows it’s true like wyverns know the stars and mother deer know their fawns. It’s an animal kind of knowing—something born not of learning but of the blood. This is something in his veins. This is something he’s carried since birth,  _ been _ since birth, rearing its head only now. 

“He died and I wasn’t dying anymore,” he murmurs. 

He feels his mother move. She shifts closer so she’s bracketing his back, and wraps her arms around him. There, held tightly between his parents, Khalid lets himself breathe freely. 

Monster is not a new title for him. He has been called every variation of it—devil by some, beast by others—but he has never once believed it when people call him a monster. He’s never lent the palace maids or guards creedence when they whisper about him. Not until now. 

Now he feels like the floor has opened up below him. He feels like everything he’s ever known about himself is falling apart in his hands, running through his fingers like sand. Between his parents, held in their arms, they’re the only thing keeping him from falling. 

He opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is an undignified whimper. Not suited to a prince, but he can’t seem to care. 

His mother brushes her hand through his hair. “Hush, my love…”

“What’s wrong with me?” He manages, finally. 

He dreads the answer as he dreads the long pause that comes before it. He rolls over to look up at his parents on either side of him, catching the tail end of a glance they share.

For a second he thinks the glance means they will affirm his fears, but then they speak. 

“Nothing,” his father says. “Absolutely nothing.”

He looks so sure, and he squeezes Khalid’s hand tight as he says it, as if trying to convey that sureity through touch as well as his strong voice.

Khalid feels his mother move beside him, feels her put her hands on either side of his face and guide him so he’s looking up at her. Her green eyes, mirrors of his own, bore into him.

“Nothing,” she says emphatically. “Do you hear us?”

He nods.

“You were made by us,” she says. “Not by any god or goddess—and you are _perfect_. You are perfect and anyone who dares to think differently is wrong, and they will learn so the hard way. Do you hear us? Nothing is wrong with you.”

He nods again, and feels his eyes sting where there are no more tears left to shed. 

He wants to believe them. He wants to believe them more than anything else—that this burning  _ something _ in his veins that hungers and sings out for the life of others is  _ normal— _ that he is perfect like they are so sure he is.

But he’s not so sure he can. Not now, still tasting blood in his mouth. He should be dead but he isn’t. 

So for now he just nods, closes his eyes, and holds fast. 

**Author's Note:**

> [connor from cyberlife voice] TWENTY-EIGHT STAB WOUNDS
> 
> Find me on tumblr @fizzityuck, on twitter @claregormy, or dead in the middle of the C-O-Double M-O-N


End file.
